


Sorbet

by pseudocitrus



Category: Tokyo Ghoul, Tokyo Ghoul:re
Genre: Angst, F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mild Gore, Mildly Dubious Consent, Referenced cannibalism, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-25 23:24:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3828736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudocitrus/pseuds/pseudocitrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arima asks for Akira's help interrogating a ghoul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorbet

**Author's Note:**

> done for a tumblr anon that requested "a seiaki fic that will give me the most intense chest pain."
> 
> so...so basically i just tried to write something to stab the hardest. owo
> 
> have a good day!

 

There’s a ghoul being interrogated.

“ _Interrogated?_ ” Akira wrinkles her nose.

But Arima doesn’t explain further.

“Just come.”

She follows him down the corridors, keeps her face straight as Arima opens a door and instructs the room’s occupants to vacate. They do, one by one, huffing, their faces streaked with sweat and blood. Then Arima holds the door for her, and Akira glances at him, and enters.

There’s a figure in the room, restrained to a chair. For some reason, her heart seizes — she halts, mid-step — a name bloats into her mind and, just as in all the times before, she tries to silence it before the syllables can wreak havoc.

 _No,_ she snaps at herself. _NO._

The figure — the _ghoul_ — looks at her. Its gaze pierces her through a curtain of bloody white hairs, and even though one eye is wide and black and red, her heart jerks again, and this time feels like it’s plummeting to the pit of her stomach. Akira takes a step back, into Arima. She jumps, and looks at him.

Her voice is bare.

“But…”

She can’t even finish.

“It’s unexpected,” he agrees. “But it explains why we couldn’t find the body.”

“What are you _talking_ about?” Akira hisses. “It’s not like it was a mystery. We couldn’t find his body because they _ate him_.”

“Obviously not.”

Another sound fills the room then, low, and loud: a laugh.

“You’re right, Akira,” the ghoul says. Its smile is wide — much wider than is familiar. “As usual, you’re right, you’re right, you’re always right. They did eat me. Over and over and over and over. Apparently, I’m pretty delicious.”

They stare at as it hunches and rolls back and forth in the chair. “You want to have a taste? We can trade. A taste for a taste. I’m hungry. I’m hungry —”

“ _Shut up!_ ” Akira snarls. She doesn’t want to see it — doesn’t even want to look at it — not with that voice, not with that face.

This is a trick. This has to be some kind of elaborate prank. Haise is one thing — but — to see someone that she _knew_ —

Her eyes are stinging; her vision is blurring. She shoves Arima out of the way of the door and exits, but even down the corridor, even at her office, even in her own apartment, she can hear it, the _ghoul_ , laughing.

:::

They’re trying to figure out how it happened, trying to get more information about Aogiri, but the ghoul won’t budge. They try everything, try every limb and organ, but all he yields are soliloquies and lectures and, increasingly, pleas for food. Arima doesn’t say anything, but there is a certain way that silence swells at the ends of their meetings, and the whole conversation happens there, unspoken, in the tense air.

_Will you try?_

_No. No. NO._

:::

Knowing that he is alive is worse than when Akira thought that he was dead.

_Was there anything that I could have done?_

_Should I have been searching for him?_

This whole time, while she was eating, and commuting, and sitting through boring meetings — what was happening to him? What was being done to him?

She can’t sleep, and when she does, she dreams of normal things. She dreams of living through scenes of her own ordinary life, but this time, she can hear his distant screams.

:::

She doesn’t talk to anyone. At home, Maris Stella becomes wary of drawing close; she’s too shy of being squeezed.

In her most private moments, Akira finds herself thinking, _Maybe…maybe, maybe maybe._

_Maybe he — maybe, like Haise, he could —_

:::

Those thoughts end the day the ghoul manages to escape his bonds. He devours a hand and decapitates two interrogators before he is restrained again.

Someone is sobbing in the office, and Akira looks away as they are instructed to go home.

:::

“Now that he’s all healed again,” Arima says, “they have to start from the very beginning.”

He’s so hard to understand.

“You don’t approve?” Akira tries.

She suspects, for a moment, that Haise softened him up after all.

“I don’t approve of useless methods,” Arima explains. “Stabbing him, maiming him, scooping out his eyes, uncoiling his insides centimeter by centimeter and strewing them all around that room…I don’t know why they think doing it all a second time is going to lead to a different outcome.”

He looks at her. Adjusts his glasses. The silence swells.

_Will you try?_

What she should say is: _Sure._

_I’ll go in there. I’ll do what all of you have too much sentiment to do. I’ll do the one and only thing that should be done to ghouls._

But she doesn’t say anything.

After a while he withdraws a handkerchief from his pocket and hands it to her, and she takes it, with fingers so weak she feels like she can barely hold it. She crams it against her face, and, sometime later, leaves.

:::

While Arima calls ahead to empty the room for her, she refreshes herself on its schematics. There aren’t any cameras. The door, too, is lockable.

Akira retrieves a suitcase, and checks her appearance — just to make sure that — that’s there’s nothing loose, and yank-able. She makes her way to the room, enters, and closes the door behind her.

The ghoul looks much better than he did before — he was hosed down, probably — his face is clean enough that she can see his skin has just a little color. Seeing her, his nostrils flare. He inhales, deep, and sighs.

“Akiraaaa.”

He has the same tone she remembers him using to say things like _beer_ or _kushikatsu_.

She hopes its not obvious that her blood is chilling. She swallows.

“What happened to you?”

It’s not the question she intended to ask — at least, not quite in this way — with her voice cracking, with the words slipping out between her teeth.

“I’ll show you,” he answers, with a grin. “Come here. Come here. Come here.” His elbows jerk as he thrashes against his restraints. “I’ll give you a demonstration, Akiraaa. You were always so good at those, right? I had to be shown a lot. But you, you, you, _you_ can see anything just once and know it.”

Listening to him is…horrible. She drops her suitcase on the ground and his eyes flicker.

“It’s no good, you know. You’ll just wreck your arm. It’ll get all tired and tough and stringy.” He works his tongue against the creases of his teeth. “No good. Useless. Worthless.”

Akira takes one step toward him. She’d overheard rumors of this.

“You don’t feel pain?”

“Pain isn’t hunger,” he says. “You get full eventually.” He licks his lips. “Speaking of which —”

“How about your ego?” Akira asks. One more step. “Does that still get bruised? Do you remember how badly you wanted a promotion, how much you wanted to fight ghouls?”

His mouth works. He shifts in his seat. Akira takes it as a good sign.

“How about our final test in school?” she ventures. “Remember how you beat me by ten points, until I pointed out that the teacher graded a problem wrong?”

Is she imagining his eyes focusing, just a bit? She leans forward, slightly, to see — and he lunges at her, so fast and harsh that the bolted chair rattles.

 _“I don’t care about petty shit like that any more! Give me food!_ ”

Akira’s mouth opens — she starts to call his name, but he drowns her out, his eyes wild, his wrists bleeding from the bite of his shackles. She stays until her ears begin to throb, and then she leaves, suitcase banging against the shutting door.

:::

Arima agrees to give room access to only her.

“One week,” he tells her, and she nods, and wracks her brain. She goes through every yearbook and report card and little diary she kept. In the interrogation room, she recites: their first meeting, the class with the teacher they both hated, the way he called her cold-blooded. All he does is scream and salivate and as the days pass some increasingly wild part of her almost wants to laugh.

_This is just like how it was before._

Arguing with each other. Getting more frustrated than she’s been in years, so furious that for the first time forever she feels an old fire eating up her skin. If she closes her eyes, it’s almost like he’s back.

…almost. Unlike before, his demands never change, and he doesn’t give in, or get bored. She warns him that the interrogators will return once the week’s out, and he only licks his lips.

“It isn’t working,” Akira tells Maris Stella as the cat pads cautiously toward her filling bowl. “It isn’t working, and they’re going to interrogate him, and that’s going to be just as useless.”

Maris Stella regards her and then lowers her head and eats. Akira runs her hand across Maris Stella’s soft back.

“Pain isn’t working,” Akira repeats. “So I’ve been thinking…I’ve been wondering…”

She trails off again.

“There aren’t any cameras,” she continues, in a whisper. “And there’s a lock on the door. Would it be too…much?”

:::

 _Too selfish,_ she means.

And, _too sick._

:::

But there is just one more day.

She does her best to reason with him, but he can’t focus; he’s mumbling about his hunger, and every once in a while bows over his growling stomach.

“Come closer, Akira,” he interrupts, hoarsely, “come closer, closer. You’re so cold-blooded that I wonder if you’d be like sorbet. Fresh sweet apple sorbet.”

This is the end of the last hour, and he is exactly the same as the first day that she saw him. This is not working. This is not working.

_That’s it._

She moves, faster than any thoughts she might have about stopping herself. She locks the room’s door and starts back to him.

“You want so badly to have a taste?” she asks. “Fine.”

He straightens as she strides back to him, and opens his mouth to say something, and is distracted by what she is taking out of her suitcase: thick, strong tape. He is startled just long enough for her to cut a strip and slap it over his mouth.

It’s messy — she doesn’t cover him securely. She tears off another strip, and then another, and smacks them down, overlapping, until the lower part of his face is totally covered.

He shakes his head vehemently, and once he’s figured out he can’t do anything about it, he glares at her. Akira presses her palm gently over his face. His eyes widen, and then narrow; he thrashes again, but even though she is millimeters away from his mouth, he can’t take a single bite.

“Pain won’t work on you,” Akira says quietly. “So I’ve been thinking that I might try the opposite.”

She runs her hands through his pale hair, traces the bone of his ears, and he screams, muffled. He is furious, and his taped mouth bangs and scrapes again and again against her fingers and knuckles, ineffectually.

She remains patient. She feels his heartbeat (it’s fast, and so human-like). She feels his forearms (so much bulkier than before). She smoothes her hands over his cheeks (hollow), and then downward, over his shoulders (bent), his chest (heaving), his belly (quivering). She goes even further, then, cradling the soft mass between his legs, and for the first time in a week he goes completely still, and silent.

He is so pale, and she watches him closely as she fondles him, searching for some sign of fear, or hatred. She’s familiar with the way both of those things look on him, and mostly, he just looks stunned. But then his face transitions into something not too far from his usual expression: hunger.

His body gives a shudder that is unlike the past week’s wild struggles. He stares at her, and then down, at the still-growing erection that she is withdrawing from his rags and continuing to coax to fullness.

She runs her hand lightly, briskly, up and down, until he is so stiff that his cock bobs and remains standing when she releases him. He makes another muffled noise when she does, a soft one that is somewhat high, and she ignores it, and ignores, too, the trace of his gaze and the tremble of her own hands as she steps out of her tights.

She reaches for him again, pumping gently with one hand while the other dips between her own legs and begins to stroke. She’s efficient, when it comes to herself, but it surprises her anyway when her fingers slick up more more quickly than usual. She swallows.

__Selfish._ _

__Sick._ _

She rubs her fingers together and he inhales sharply and groans. It’s the most pleasant sound she’s heard him make. His cock pushes out a droplet of precum, and she rolls back and forth against his slit with the pad of her thumb.

“I didn’t know it until a year or so ago,” Akira says, not looking at him in the face. “Not until I could think about you again. I went to visit your grave, and I saw your family there, and they said some things that made me realize it, too late. Now, though, it seems so obvious. You were always looking at me.”

He doesn’t nod or shake his head. But his face is starting to color, beneath the tape.

“And I never said anything,” she tells him. “I never said anything, until someone accused me of feeling nothing. And by then it was too late.”

Does he even understand her? She tries to search his eyes, even the black one. They look hazy, and his body is beginning to buck, slightly, against her palm, and it feels like the room’s temperature has increased by several degrees.

“You’ve said a lot of things that were just flat-out wrong,” she says quietly. “But your most incorrect statement, by far, is that I’m ‘cold-blooded.’”

She can’t help scanning the room’s ceilings one last time for cameras, and glancing one last time at the door’s deadbolt. Her mouth is watery, her pulse fast. She sets her hands on his shoulders, and eases herself onto him. He groans, and drops his head backward over the top of the chair as she sinks down. She wraps her arms around his neck and holds his face close, over her shoulder, as she begins to drag her body up and down against him.

He’s shifting in the chair, trying to move more vigorously against her, and failing. His breathing is becoming irregular, gusting her hair back and forth. He’s tickling her ear, and filling it with moans of increasing volume, and she buries her face against him, eyes squeezed shut, biting back her own voice into her throat.

It’s no more beautiful than his demands for food, and no less urgent. She thrusts until their setting and circumstances and the re-ruptured hollow in her begins to fill and fade.

His chains are clattering; his muscles are stiffening, seizing. Her fingernails dig down into his hair as he begins to spasm and gasp desperately through his nose, and she tightens around him as she climaxes too, knees and elbows gripping.

Then she slumps, head resting against his neck. _Just for a moment,_ she thinks. _Just for a couple minutes._

A couple minutes where three years haven’t passed since the raid. Where all their mistakes were never made. Where they are the same, or at least as whole, as before.

:::

Minutes.

An eternity.

Not enough.

:::

Akira stands. Her legs are steady. She covers him up again, and then puts her own clothing back on, patting it down, noting the streaks of moisture on her uniform’s shoulder. Then she turns back toward him, and rips off the tape, strip by strip. Each one parts from his skin loudly, and scatters droplets.

“A-Akira,” he whispers, when his mouth is free. “Akira. Akira. Akira. I’m sorry.”

His face is blotchy, not just where the tape was. Both cheeks are gleamy with tears.

“Are you alright?” she asks, and he just bows his head down and away from her and shudders. Tears fall into his lap.

“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me what happened to you.”

“They made me,” he sobs. “They made me. They made me so, so hungry.”

Her heart twists. She rests her hand on his shoulder.

“It’s alright,” she tells him, feeling her eyes sting, “it’s alright —”

But he is just shaking his head, and trying to get away from her, and failing, because of the restraints. This is cruel. She reaches to undo them. “S —”

 _“No!”_ he roars, and Akira leaps back. _“Don’t touch me! Get away from me! Get away!”_

She tries to calm him down, tries to draw near again, tries to break through — but he just screams, and gasps, and struggles.

“ _Get out!_ ” he snarls. “ _Get out, or I’ll eat you, I’ll eat you, I’ll eat you!”_

:::

Three years have passed since the raid. Everything is wrong. They are not the same, or as whole, as before.

“Well?” Arima asks, and Akira can’t meet his eyes.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what happened to him? Or, you don’t know if he can get better?”

“I don’t know,” Akira repeats.

Arima waits for more, and then turns away.

:::

The week is done.

The interrogators come back, and this time it’s different. The screams are audible, somehow, everywhere. The office is tense. This time, when he breaks out, Arima himself is summoned. Minutes later, she gets the call.

“Go home,” Arima instructs, and she hangs up.

:::

If he’s surprised to see her in the labs later, he, as usual, doesn’t show it. Akira hands him a surgical mask, and rolls up her sleeves.

:::

Days later, he calls her into his office.

“The rights are yours,” he tells her.

Akira blinks. “But you —”

“The rights,” he repeats, “are yours.”

He holds the finished suitcase out to her, and she takes it, with fingers so weak she feels like she can barely hold it. She brings it up and clutches it to her chest. Arima clears his throat.

“Takizawa’s specifications are as follows —”

“Seidou,” Akira interrupts.

“Pardon?”

“Seidou.”

Her knuckles are pale.

Arima pushes his glasses up. “Are you ready to hear Seidou’s specifications?”

A minute.

An eternity.

She opens her mouth.

“Yes.”


End file.
